Film reviews: Anora | Heretic | Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story | Juror #2

Heretic (15) ★★★☆☆

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (12A) ★★★★☆

Juror #2 (12A) ★★★☆☆

Maybe it’s too early to call next year’s best actress Oscar race, but if Anora star Mikey Madison doesn’t end up being the front-runner something is very wrong. As the lead in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner, she gives everything to the title role of a sex worker whose brief relationship with the wastrel son of a Russian oligarch leads to a whole heap of trouble after a week of purchased “fun” results in a spontaneous Vegas wedding and some swift reprisals from her new husband’s family, as they desperately try to get the marriage annulled. Pretty Woman this ain’t.

That should come as no surprise if you’ve seen previous Baker films such as Tangerine and Red Rocket. Like those raw, serio-comic slice-of-life dramas, Anora is a sex-positive film that centres and, crucially, empathises with those who are trying to survive in a world where sex and commerce are ruthlessly intertwined. It’s a world given to chaos, especially in the cold light of day when the fantasy that’s being bought and sold is exposed for the sham it is.

That happens when Anora - who prefers the name Ani - is left high-and-dry by her new husband Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), who runs away like a little boy when his parents’ goons descend upon his luxury crib to sort out the impulsive mess he’s created. The farce that ensues is both horrifying and hilarious as Ani refuses to back down when confronted with people intent on treating her like trash. She’s worldly enough to know that all that really separates them from her is the amount of money they’ve accumulated, though she’s not so cynical about life not to want something more from it, a theme Baker subtly teases this out via her interactions with Igor (Yuriy Borisov), one of the hired heavies trying to track down Vanya.

Like John Cassavetes, Baker has a gift for capturing the gritty, poetic reality of his characters’ lives in all its unapologetically messy glory, but in Madison, he’s lucked out too by finding his Gena Rowlands. Having broken through in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, she brings a defiant dignity to Ani: she’s fierce and funny, but tender too - and her final scene, when everything she’s gone through finally hits her, is an absolute heart-breaker.

Hugh Grant gets properly nasty in Heretic, a creepy-until-it’s-not horror film about a pair of teenage Mormon missionaries who find their faith tested in extreme ways when they knock on the wrong person’s door. Dressed in Gyles Brandreth-style knitwear and Jeffrey Dahmer-style glasses, Grant’s Mr Reed is an unsettling cross between genial and sinister as he feigns interest in Mormonism to lure the naively devout Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and the more wary Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) into his house. Whatever nervousness they have about entering, though, isn’t enough to trump their zealotry, a point Mr Reed seeks to make as he leads them into a slippery theological discussion about the pick-and-mix nature of religious belief that seems increasingly like a trap. 

Essentially a claustrophobic chamber piece, the film is at its strongest during these initial verbal contretemps. Co-written and co-directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (who together wrote A Quiet Place), they have a lot of fun capitalising on Grant’s ability to nail a particular kind of bumptious toxicity as his character sets out to not just show these young women all the ways they’re wrong, but annihilate their core beliefs once and for all. 

As the film moves into its second half, however, it becomes more reliant on the parlour tricks of a sadistic locked-room thriller, which takes the air out of both the film and its antagonist. The end result feels too timid for a moment in which religiosity could stand being taken down a peg or two.

For anyone who grew up loving the original Superman films, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story will likely be an emotional ride. The bitter irony of Reeve’s paralysis after playing the most iconic superhero of all time gave the actor - who died 20 years ago - a tragic arc. Rather than indulge in mawkish sentimentality or hagiography, though, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui separate the man from the myth he embodied. 

Starting with the show-jumping accident that left Reeve paraplegic and on a ventilator, they use a wealth of archival material and some bracingly honest interviews with family, friends and colleagues to find a more grounded way to characterise, contextualise and make sense of his inspirational life as a latter-day activist and family man, one who did ultimately find ways to embody Superman’s core ideals in his everyday struggles.

Potentially Clint Eastwood’s final film as a director, Juror #2 finds the 94-year-old legend on typically no-nonsense form with a straightforward legal thriller that takes a preposterous conceit and uses it to interrogate the inequities of the American justice system. 

Nicholas Hoult stars as an expectant father whose selection for jury duty is complicated by the sudden realisation that he’s got intimate knowledge of the crime being tried, a potentially intriguing twist rendered ridiculous by the boilerplate way Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams explain away why the case is being prosecuted in such an open-and-shut manner. 

But in downplaying the melodrama, Eastwood gradually turns the film into quite a watchable character study of a flawed man trying to figure out how to do the right thing in a society quick to define people by the mistakes they’ve made.

All films in cinemas from 1 November